Democracy and human Rights Development Centre (DHRD), with the cooperation of NED Organization, has completed its fourth year in the project of Court Support in Kurdistan Region, it means that the project has entered its fifth year. The project is derived from our deep believe in independency of the power of jurisdiction and freedom of courts from any interference. It is also an attempt to regain the confidence of the people in the power of court and jurisdiction in this region.

DHRD Centre is publishing its fourth report about this project for the year 2010. The report is dealing with the violations been committed against the court and law jurisdiction, human rights, and detainees’ rights during the year 2010. Because of the difficulties and obstacles that faced the project in collecting information and comparing data, it was not easy to identify and document all the violations. Still, with the cooperation of a number of the judges, public prosecutors, lawyers and solicitors our task became much easier, and with their thankful efforts we could identify and document the violations.

The aim of this report is to identify, collect, and publish all the violations and assaults that happened against human rights and detainees rights during the interrogation and investigation stages till the trail stages of the cases. It aims also to eliminate the obstacles in front of the jurisdiction power in performing its duty properly, in order to regain the confidence of the people in the power of law; and finally to try to urge the concerned parties to put an end to these violations.

We have recently initialized a branch within our main website www.dhrd.info, under the name (court support), in order to publish the activities of the project and all its reports; in addition of publishing the decisions issued by court of cassation in Kurdistan region, and the decisions issued by the courts of appeal in the cities of Suleimaniyah, Erbil, and Duhok with cassation power.

We were able to observe nearly 872 violations of the judicial power and detainees rights during the year 2010. These violations is been classified to five sections in the report, starting with investigation stages, then court stages, civil courts, cassation court of the region, and ending with the violations that are happening in the executive facilities.

As the court of appeal in Erbil did not agree to give us the exact number of the cases been registered there, with the number of the unsolved cases during the year 2010, claiming that we may use these information for the benefit of our centre, we were not able to make a comparison between the violations been registered by our observers with the number of the cases been registered by this court, except for the cases been solved in the open trails.

We must not forget here to praise the role of the head of the appeal courts of Suleimaniyah and Duhok for their tremendous and continuous cooperation for succeeding this project.